Mozfest is a unique experience. Hard to describe and even harder to plan for, it’s a 3 day wild ride of open source/science/access/education/web/politics communities coming together. Nokome and myself jumped in to join the scrum to learn about new projects, connect with old friends, and meet new colleagues.

We joined eLife Innovation’s Open Science Soapbox session, a lively session of lightning talks by open projects that focus on the scientific and scholarly research space. PREreview, a new forum to support students and postdoc journal clubs to review preprints and share their feedback with authors. Open the North seeks to build a mobile app for the Guide to the Guide to Eating Ontario Fish to make these data accessible to far northern communities. The Dat Project, also under the Code for Science & Society non-profit presented Dat in the Lab, an initiative to develop and pilot Dat-based workflows for data sharing and publishing in research labs. The amazing Marcos Vital presented his TeachR project. It was an energetic session with so many inspiring projects we’ll be following!

We also checked out the Whitaker Lab’sBrain Networks in Python session where we learned about how cognitive neuroscience uses python through a hands on reproduction of the analysis of a network neuroscience paper. We got the chance to learn more about Beaker Browser, a decentralized web browser built on Dat, from developer Tara Vancil. By the end of the conference, we were exhausted. We met many new friends and colleagues interested in reproducible research and left feeling inspired and full of new ideas for collaboration.

From Mozfest, the Stencila world tour rolled on to Cambridge. Nokome and I visited the eLife offices where user experience designer Nick Duffield (more on Nick’s work at eLife here) has been conducting user testing. I sat in on a session and will now forever think “what would Nick do?” when observing people interact with software. Thank you eLife for working with us!

Some of the photos are from the Mozfest flickr - they’re cc-by (so, thanks for asking the question so I could add attribution!). The other photos are mine, and those are cc0. If you have more qs about the licensing of the Open Science Soapbox, ask @eLifeInnovation. Great to see you!